Langer, Lawrence. The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1975.
Langer focuses on a series of themes that to the author illustrate the aesthetic problem of reconciling:
- normalcy with horror
- displacement of the consciousness of life by the imminence and pervasiveness of death
- violation of the coherence of childhood
- assault on physical reality
- disintegration of the rational intelligence
- disruption of chronological time
He has chosen a series of Holocaust themed works to illustrate these themes – all the works have English translations (one of the selection limitations) – What he is bringing into focus is a LITERATURE OF ATROCITY.
75-88 Deep discussion of Elie Wiesel’s night – and a comparison with Anne Frank’s diary…
Page 93. Langer talks about the reality of the existence of Auschwitz being challenged by those victims, who filled with fear and apprehension – reluctant to admit the awful fate that awaited them…They used the power of imagination to contend with that fate - .. “for their destination was too real to be fantastic and too fantastic to be real – the “unreal reality” infected everyone’s dreams during the Third Reich….”
Page 134, Words of Camus: Camus anticipated when he called on the artists of his time to create dangerously "an equilibrium between reality and man's rejection of that reality ... different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular but Universal, full of innocent insecurity."
(Camus "Create Dangerously, " in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, P. 203.
Page 135. Langer talks about Ilsa Aichinger in Herod's Children; a novel whose singular tensions prompt one to describe it as a fairy tale enveloped in a nightmare. These terms coalesce in Camus' precise formulation " innocent insecurity" , as they do in the novel itself, which narrates the attendance of a band of children in an unspecified wartime City ( clearly Vienna) controlled by the Third Reich to escape a threatening tyranny and gain freedom. So it, too, is never named, it does not take long to guess the nature of the monster from which they are fleeing ; the children are so uncertain of their status or identity because they are from Jewish or part- Jewish families.
Page 136 -137. To be young in Herod's Children, is to be a victim not only of one's religious Heritage and of the Nazi, but of all those who are older: Our grandparents ... The situation of the children is partly a consequence of circumstance, partly a result of their refusal to surrender to a fate that has paralyzed the will of the elders or driven them into an exile where children cannot follow; whatever the reasons; their figurative orphanhood leaves them tell me only the realm of fantasy, of children's "games" to secure their identity and verify their humanity. Reality no longer offers the opportunity for such discoveries, in fact, in L'univers concentrationnaire, as Ilsa Aichinger conceives of it, life seems to have discarded the notion of individual identity, so that in self-defense, paradoxically, the child searches in fantasy for its meaning and Destiny.
Page 156. “One of the most bewitching paradoxes of the art of atrocity is that, like music, it depends on sounds, not Stillness, for its aesthetic effect, even though the theme it chooses, in certain of its features, may seem inexpressible. Ilsa Aichinger's method of composition reverses the principle of the Wagnerian leitmotif: she introduces a harmony, rouses the ear's expectation, fills the mind with familiar association - then adds a dissonance that abruptly undercuts the continuity and produces an intellectual shock which in turn seems exactly to fill Wolfgang Borchert's request for new laws of harmony that would discard the well-tempered clavichords of pre-war German prose and thought.”
Page 166-192. Langer discusses Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. – According to Langer, nowhere in the literature of atrocity, is conception of “metaphor an instrument of dehumanization more effectively exploited than in Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird. Langer makes comparisons with Dante’s Inferno – noting that this work is a “model of pattern and causality, with each torture a logical extension of the victim’s sin, and the total panorama of Hell the supreme expression of a divine justice”…
Page 205 – 249. Langer examines madness in the context of The Holocaust. He notes that one of the most gruesome details of The Holocaust is how many witnesses doubted their sanity and wondered whether the source of “derangement lay in his own inadequate vision of the nature of the details he was examining.”…
Page 249. In this chapter Langer talks about the totally random nature of death...”to the point of extinguishing the significance of the individual, not only in the eyes of the public, but also in his own estimation too.” Langer goes onto comment that the Holocaust snapped the chain – the continuous linkage in history between the chain of history and human experience….
Page 250-296. In speaking of “time and Atrocity”, Langer focuses on the inability – the failure of “the individual to master tine implicit in the experiences of l’univers concentrationnaire.”…where the abuse of feelings, the body, and the mind beyond recognition…
Page 252-265. Langer discusses in depth André Schwartz-Bart’s “The Last of the Just.”.
Page 252. ASB adopts a chronological method, pitting all the former generations of Jewish suffering against the “single culminating instant of Jewish extinction in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.” ASB proceeds to trace the annals of the Levy family, and the legend that in each generation one Just Man exists as an “emblem of the suffering which is the lot of his fellow Jews.”
Page 253. He introduces the only possible ‘logical explanation’ for the ‘egregious excesses’ of l’univers concentrationnaire: precedents in time. If ASB can somehow “make imaginatively acceptable the notion of a tragic destiny among these people that establishes extraordinary suffering as their human fate, enhancing their dignity even as it ignobly deprives them of their lives, then what they endure appears less shocking to our civilized instincts, less a betrayal of the faith in human continuity that protects each man against a random an anonymous death.”
Page 253. ASB is, after Elie Wiesel, the author to most thoroughly explore the role of God – in “his supreme oppression of his people, “He examines whether/ how “the shield of divinity seems to offer a patina of logic, similar to the temporal one, that permits the mind at least to conceive of extinction…within a familiar context – namely, faith, mercy, and the profound mystery of being.”…ASB extinguishes, one by one these ‘well-known lamps of the mind and the soul’ as he enables us to follow Ernie Levy’s “relentless march towards the darkness of Auschwitz.”
Page 254. A prophet’s dire warnings are not enough to dissuade Ernie Levy’s father from staying in Germany, because he still has “one foot in the old days…In the dream…the possibility of rebirth out of suffering, the tradition that has sustained his ancestors through generations and centuries of oppression.” He cannot accept that Jewish blood will be spilled “without meaning”. He cannot imagine anything appalling enough to “nullify tradition.” This discovery is reserved for the child Ernie himself…”
Page 255. AT first, Ernie passes through “the rite of knowledge and intuition – “to which all earlier heirs to the rank of Just Men had been exposed”… Then ASB takes us through the “initiation of Ernie that destroys his innocence and replaces it with a blank futility fitting no previous pattern of the entrance into maturity….” Ernie’s humiliation and degradation at the hands of his Nazi teacher and classmates leads Ernie to feel that “all these things were without precedent.” His attempt to interpret - his experiences, according to Langer, “provide us with the “most explicit statement in the literature of atrocity of the “unreal reality” – the fusion of the fantastic with the factual….”
The little boy did not budge, staring at the spinning disk of the sun. These events concerned someone else. Nothing like that had ever happened to anyone. That was not the slightest allusion to any such phantasmagoria in the Legends of the Just Men. desperately tense, Ernie searched his memories, hoping to find a clear path, a road to help him through that Forest of strange circumstances, which did not seem entirely real though they bore a certain appearance of reality.... He found no Road. (Page 262 The Last of the Just.)
Ernie cannot find any resources in himself capable of fighting against a challenge from creatures on an unknown planet - his human imagination cannot recognize – As Langer notes, this dead end in Ernie’s imagination leads to a build up of ‘hatred in his heart’ and as ASB puts it,
Page 256. "This damned-up poison spreads throughout his own personality, rousing intuitions of emptiness that finally drive Ernie to a contempt for the living shall he has become." Ernie experiences nullification of self, reminiscent of the appalled horror of the young Elie Wiesel upon arriving in Auschwitz... "Man suspended in time, a flaccid vessel of flesh from which all of the spirit have been pumped, seeking instinctively to re-establish some residents with creation of aware that the unprecedented nature of his basement leaves and no appeal with in reality."
Page 256-257. Ernie tries to commit suicide in a last attempt to gain some control over his existence. But he fails. From then on, ASB refers to Ernie as “the Late Ernie Levy”
Langer views this failure of Ernie to “conquer time and rehabilitate his image in human memory (if not in eternity) assumes the significance of a symbolic ritual for his people.
Page 257. The condition of atrocity, "which is Ernie's Affliction, has eradicated all roots that nourished his civilized longings , creating that schizophrenic temperament we have encountered before, one of the chief bequests of l'univers concentrationnaire: a sensibility so shocked that it can no longer take seriously its efforts to remain alive, even while another part of its nature automatically continues with the motions of survival."
Page 258. Ernie tried to become the sole of a dog, as a device to protect himself from the abuses in his own eyes against his status as a man. It does not work; he is not able to restore the balance of his self-respect; even adopting the attitude of self-abasement does not work. Ernie tries to rejoin the familiar stream of time.
Page 259 -260. Back to Paris, we are given an interlude: a moment of love between Ernie and Golda. in a discussion with Ernie Golda sets out the conundrum: does the circumstance that Time existed before the moment of creation ensure the continued, meaningful existence of those created within time and of the motions of the heart and the will to endure which give Golda the courage to play defiantly on her harmonica in the midst of their enemies. The instinctive human impulse to believe in the significance of suffering to discover evidence of a tradition to support its meaning, is pitted against Golda's simple question, why have Christians always hated and persecuted Jews? And both her question and Ernie's reply force the dilemma into a framework of historical perspective which, given the concluding events of the novel, provides a deliberately dubious explanation of this culminating catastrophe of the Jewish people.
Page 261. By allowing himself to follow Golda and be interred with her at Drancy, Ernie accepts his fate…He is not able to imagine the horrors of the tortures inflicted on him by the Gestapo that leave him “a scarcely human creature capable of only infant babbling.”
Page 261. The final chapter of the Last of the Just is called “Never Again”. As Langer reports, it is a “lamentation for the fate of Ernie and the Jews, crystallizing a problem with permeates the literature of atrocity, the search on the part of the victim and survivor for a viable attitude to make endurable, if not comprehensible, the human and spiritual implications of that fate.”
Page 262. Unlike Kosinski and many other Atrocity writers, ASB deliberately takes us into the heart of the Gas Chamber.the deepest darkness of the Holocaust… He “compels the imagination to grasp, together with Ernie Levy for some breath of lucidity in the very crucible of extinction.” In the closing Pages of this novel, we are told that “Ernie’s knowledge that “no heir, no memory would supervene to prolong the silent parade of victims.” (Page 419 of The Last of the Just.)
Page 263. As Ernie sinks into unconsciousness inside the gas chamber, his last instinctive gesture is to hurl a desperate affirmation at life’s denial of him and his fellow Jews: … by recalling the legend of an ancient Rabbi…who while dying wrapped in the Pages of the Torah, sees the letters taking wing…Ernie with his dying gasp says, ah yes, surely the letters are taking wing.” (Page 421-422 of The Last of the Just.)
Page 263. Langer explains that the penultimate paragraph of the novel “compounds the dilemma of interpretation by introducing a dreadful antiphony that polarizes the two possible realities of the Holocaust…“The alternatives are: either the horror of the concentration camps is enveloped by a spiritual transcendence that can include even such catastrophes in its vision of human history; or the names still fearful of the ears of men muffle the paean to God with the terror-stricken echoes of unredeemable suffering.
Page 263.
ASB leaves his readers with two possible realities of the Holocaust…even as it attempts to interweave them. Langer states that “the only living memorial to Ernie Levy is The Last of the Just itself, and whether or not it ‘takes wing’ and endures will depend on one’s private response to and interpretation of the experience which it records.”
